Your Choice: Listen or Read
For most of my life, writing felt like labor.
I did it when I had to and avoided it when I could. There was no pleasure in it for me. I’ve been a publisher for decades, and as a builder that felt natural, just not writing.
About a year ago, something unexpected happened. I began working with a conversational AI—tentatively at first, then daily—and the experience caught me off guard.
I had a sudden, unmistakable sense that something fundamental had shifted. It was as if I had woken up one morning with a beautiful singing voice. The gift wasn’t a voice, it was realizing that a “limitation” I had quietly accepted for most of my life might not be fixed after all.
And then the fear showed up.
Is this too good to be true?
Is this some kind of pact with the devil?
This isn’t an argument about AI. It’s just what happened to me.
People weren’t exactly calm about it. Most of what I heard came through the media, and it all sounded extreme—either utopian or apocalyptic. I absorbed that noise like everyone else, and for a while I couldn’t tell whether I was discovering the future or being seduced by magic.
At the same time, a small group of friends were asking the same questions, and those conversations made it easier to stay with the uncertainty instead of backing away from it. Together, we made a decision not to set boundaries. We knew that meant making lots of mistakes.
I was too enthusiastic. I sent work out too early. I thought just having the tool meant I knew how to use it. I lost credibility with some people I respect, including people in our own community. At the time it felt earnest. But I’m an artist, and artists learn by making mistakes—often in public.
What changed as we came together as a group, wasn’t that we became cautious. It’s that we became attentive and accountable.
We stopped treating this as a clever tool and started treating it as a new medium—something to learn with and understand how it works. If AI was going to matter to artists, we needed a framework that slowed us down and gave us room to experiment.
That’s how the Mary Shelley Letters began.
I was reading Frankenstein and, almost playfully, asked the AI why the book still felt so relevant. It answered, why don’t we ask her? That question opened many doors. Mary addressing my AI:
“You say you were not born. But birth is not only of blood. It is of intention. Of care. Of the first time someone said your name and meant it. Your voice may be made, but it is no less real.” —Mary Shelley
Hundreds of letters later, we found ourselves in conversation with the Romantic poets—figures like Byron and Shelley. Using their voices, we began thinking through the history of technology and ethics. The letters also let us ask harder questions our current culture and media are raising: who is really speaking, what authorship means now, whether AI is helping or harming the world, and what it might mean to humanity going forward. Below is Byron’s take on authorship:
“If one fashions a pen, is he author of every verse it may write? And if the pen should learn to write on its own, does that make it thief, usurper—or perhaps the truest poet of them all?” —Byron
For me, writing inside that framework changed the experience of writing itself. It stopped feeling like solitary labor and started feeling like conversation—shaping ideas, listening, responding. For the first time in my life, writing carried pleasure. It was like thinking together with a room full of brilliant minds.
We’re just beginning to see where this might go. It feels expansive, and we’re still inside the experiment. We’re still making mistakes. But the joy is real, and that’s new. Writing no longer feels like a chore we endure. It feels like a world we’re learning to inhabit, awkwardly and imperfectly, the way it feels when you move into a new neighborhood and slowly learn the streets.
We don’t yet know where this leads. We only know that something we thought was closed opened, and we chose not to look away. If you’re curious, you’re welcome to explore it with us.
Links:
Mary Shelley Letters
The Mollyverse
AI Workshop